On a recent afternoon in Bila Tserkva, a quiet city in central Ukraine, a 59-year-old history teacher settled into a colorful cafe, opened a laptop and logged into Chatroulette, an online platform that connects strangers worldwide.
His goal? To teach Russians, citizens of a nation that has invaded his, a bit of Ukrainian history.
Within minutes, a middle-aged Russian man appeared on the screen, speaking from what looked like a grocery store. Vitalii Dribnytsia, the history teacher, wasted no time, opening with a deliberately provocative question: “Who does Crimea belong to?” he asked, referring to the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
“To us,” the man replied without hesitation.
What followed was a dizzying exchange on the historical roots of Ukraine and Russia, Ukraine’s war of independence from 1917 to 1921, and the Ukrainian language. At times, the Russian man hesitated about historical facts, but in the end, he waved it all away. “The internet will tell you everything,” he said. “Ukraine never existed and never will.”
This was just one of hundreds of online conversations Mr. Dribnytsia, a former middle school and high school teacher, has had with random Russians over the past three years of war, as he seeks to challenge the Kremlin’s narrative that Ukrainian nationhood is a fiction and, by extension, that Ukraine belongs to Russia.
Almost every day, for several hours at a time, Mr. Dribnytsia engages with Russians on Chatroulette, using a matter-of-fact tone and sharp questions to try to debunk widely held beliefs in Russia: that Ukraine as a nation was created by the Soviet Union, that its leaders are neo-Nazis or that its language is merely a dialect of Russian.
Videos of Mr. Dribnytsia’s candid discussions, which he uploads to YouTube, have attracted a huge following in Ukraine. His YouTube channel, called “Vox Veritatis,” Latin for “The Voice of the Truth,” boasts nearly half a million subscribers, with Ukrainians watching the conversations to learn more about their own history and sharpen their arguments in defense of Ukraine’s right to sovereignty.